After reading folks' posts here on MSO about the prominent personalities on SO (Atwood, Spolsky, Skeet, Gravell, Rich B, et al) and the impact on reputation, I decided to "run some number", graph them, and of course blog about it: The Personalities of Stack Overflow by the Numbers

For the kids that can't be bothered to read my rambling, grammatically incorrect prose, here is the most interesting of the two graphs:

Reputation (x-axis) vs. Posts (y-axis) vs. Profile Views (z-axis)

The lack of a correlation between Profile Views and both a users reputation and number of posts surprised me. Anybody have any thoughts on what makes a SOpedian's profile worth visiting? Something I can look for in the data dump?

I'd like to see this re-rendered with post views on an x or y axis, to make it easier to spot some differences there.
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Joel CoehoornJul 6 '09 at 15:15

5

Also: you've got an interesting heisenburg situation going here: pointing out some of the outliers in your analysis by name will likely make them stick out even more in future tests.
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Joel CoehoornJul 6 '09 at 15:16

@Joel: The numbers are a few weeks old, and the first public analysis (that I am aware of.) Forever doomed here on out, OK, possible. But the above observation is unmolested by Heisenburg's principle.
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Stu ThompsonJul 6 '09 at 15:22

@Kyle: SO is supposed to have a wiki like quality to it, wikipedia.com users are called 'wikipedians', and I just think 'SOpedians' sounds more entertaining that mere 'users'.
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Stu ThompsonJul 6 '09 at 15:32

7

Stu: I believe the proper term would be "nerds"
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TheTXIJul 6 '09 at 15:37

1

You keep citing Heisenberg. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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bananakataJul 6 '09 at 15:41

9 Answers
9

You can't really trust profile views as a metric of popularity. I know personally that early on I fell into the habit of clicking on my own profile to view my upvotes/downvotes, etc. (this was before the "little envelope" functionality was added). I still tend to click on my profile instead of the envelope, thus potentially inflating my profile views.

In short, profile views may be a measure of popularity for some, and narcissism for others. =)

EDIT: You also can't underestimate the "train-wreck" profiles: users who give utterly horrible answers, or routinely ask terrible questions. They probably get more views just out of morbid curiosity.

Personally, I tried to make part of the space in my profile actually useful by including a reputation tracker link and custom google/uservoice searches. That's mainly for my own use, but I know some others have also found the search useful in particular, and I like to think that contributed to my profile being viewed a little more often.

So with that in mind, I'm curious to know who that outlier is from the top100 between myself and Marc Gravel. Does he have anything in his profile that might be similarly useful?

Maybe the number of profile views depends on the type of answers that a person posts. For example, a person who comes across as insanely knowledgeable (or insanely dumb) might have more profile views, that a person who just gives straightforward answers. Or a person who gives a lot of controversial answers might have more profile views because people want to see his/her profile to see if his/her answer can be trusted.

All this is just mad hypothesis, but what I'm saying is that maybe reputation and number of posts might not be the only two dimensions you should look at.

That is interesting but I think theres a lot of noise in that graph, namely you should be able to compare profiles views to one of more of the following and get a better correlation:

Total views of questions (answered or asked);

Upvotes received;

What would also make an interesting graph is to compare:

Average upvotes per answer of non-CW question vs ranking or reputation. You might want to exclude the top and bottom 5% as outliers;

% of answers that are accepted answers (non-CW questions in both cases) vs ranking or reputation (min 50 questions answered);

Average reputation gain per answer vs ranking or reputation. This one could be interesting because I think it will actually be a bell curve where Jon Skeet's will be low just because he gives so many answers above and beyond the daily rep cap. It'd be interesting to see if that holds for anyone else; and

I'm not convinced your analysis is correct. Looking at the graphs, there's a pretty clear trend of increasing bubble size with increasing distance from the origin. I think if you treat the excessively large bubbles (e.g. Jon Skeet) as outliers, the results will be more or less as expected.